Around this time last year, officials at United Launch Alliance projected 2025 would be their busiest year ever. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters the company would launch as many as 20 missions this year, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and its replacement—the Vulcan rocket.
Now, it’s likely that ULA will close out 2025 with six flights—five with the Atlas V and just one with the Vulcan rocket the company is so eager accelerate into service. Six flights would make 2025 the busiest launch year for ULA since 2022, but it falls well short of the company’s forecast.
Last week, ULA announced its next launch is scheduled for December 15. An Atlas V will loft another batch of broadband satellites for the Amazon Leo network, formerly known as Project Kuiper, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This will be ULA’s last launch of the year.
The Vulcan rocket’s sole launch this year occurred August 12, when it took off on a mission sponsored by the US Space Force. The rocket deployed an experimental military navigation satellite and at least one additional classified payload into orbit. This mission was the third flight of the Vulcan rocket, and its first national security mission after the Space Force formally certified ULA’s new launch vehicle.
United Launch Alliance is one of the Space Force’s two certified launch providers for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program and the military’s most critical space missions, delivering satellites to orbit for reconnaissance, navigation, communications, and early warning. SpaceX, the other provider, has launched its Falcon 9 rocket fleet 151 times so far this year, including six times for the Space Force’s NSSL program.
Concerns about the Vulcan rocket are nothing new at the Pentagon. In May 2024, the defense official then in charge of procuring space hardware wrote a letter to Boeing and Lockheed Martin—ULA’s corporate parents—outlining his concerns about the Vulcan rocket’s entry into service. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” wrote Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition under the Biden administration.
A year-and-a-half later, the military still has satellites waiting to launch on Vulcan.